Incident All ledgers
Venus Protocol: $100.0m
Venus Protocol lost $100.0m on 18 May 2021. Ranked 44th of 1,272 crypto failures, with method, returned funds and comparable incidents.
- Date
- 18 May 2021
- Lost
- $100.0m
- Returned or repaid
- None recorded
- Target
- DeFi Protocol
- Category
- Oracle Manipulation
- Method
- Spot Price Manipulation
- Chains
- BSC
An attacker pumped the XVS token price on thin centralized-exchange liquidity, used the inflated XVS as collateral to borrow 2,000 BTC and 5,700 ETH from Venus Protocol, and the resulting liquidation cascade left Venus with over $100M in bad debt.
Against the ledger
- It ranks 44th of the 1,272 incidents with a known loss, and 8th in 2021.
- It accounts for 34.8% of the $287.1m in known losses in May 2021.
- 159 incidents in the ledger are classified as Oracle Manipulation, for $894.1m in total. This one is 11.2% of that.
- The ledger records no returned funds.
Other incidents named Venus
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 12 May 2022 | Venus Protocol | $11.2m | DeFi Protocol | Stale Oracle Price | — |
| 15 Mar 2026 | Venus Core Pool | $3.7m | DeFi Protocol | Donation Attack | — |
| 29 Mar 2025 | Venus Core Pool | $902,000 | DeFi Protocol | Donation Attack | — |
| 11 Dec 2023 | Venus Protocol | $274,000 | DeFi Protocol | Oracle Misconfiguration | — |
Closest in size by the same method
| Date | Target | Lost | Type | Method | Returned |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 27 Oct 2021 | CREAM Lending | $130.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 11 Oct 2022 | Mango Markets V3 | $115.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 19 May 2021 | Bunny | $45.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 21 Sept 2021 | Vee Finance | $34.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
| 12 May 2021 | xToken | $24.0m | DeFi Protocol | Spot Price Manipulation | — |
All failures in 2021 · The failures ledger
Amounts are DefiLlama’s estimates and can change as incidents are revalued. Its returned figure can include money a company repaid itself, not only funds recovered from attackers. Source: DefiLlama.
Cite this Bitminer.io, “Venus Protocol, failures ledger”, data to 2 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/incident/venus-protocol-2021-05-18/. How this is built